The present invention relates in general to the field of processing of buffalo hair, and more particularly, to the creation and production of a yarn useful for the creation of garments made of buffalo hair and buffalo down.
Without limiting the scope of the invention, its background is described in connection with the formation of fibers and yarn, as an example.
Heretofore, in this field, animal fibers have been used for the creation, formation and manipulation of yarns that are useful for the manufacture of clothing. In order to produce sufficient yarn of sufficient strength a number of yarn types have been created that take advantage of different weaves and weave patterns to produce yarns. More recently, the introduction of synthetic fibers for the production of yarn yields increases in production and the strength of fibers.
For production of wool yarn, for example, the wool fibers must be spun on worsted system or on woolen system. On a worsted system, the wool staple length is long and distribution of the length usually is extremely uneven compared to those of cotton. Wool top is virtually impossible to draft with roller drafting, mechanism. Good uniformity of product requires faller bar incorporation into the process.
If a distance between drafting rollers could be set in accordance with the longest fiber length, shorter fibers would be floated, when being drafted, while longer fibers that exceed the distance between the rollers, would be broken or cut. In the former case, fallers must be applied on gill frame to control these floating fibers.
Cotton-wool blended yarns have been spun with squared wool fiber, but all-wool yarns like worsted yarns cannot be spun by means of the conventional cotton system until now. With worsted yarns produced by the conventional worsted yarn system, long fibers of more than 120 mm length of wool top occupies only about 10% of the total. Therefore, for the purpose of uniform drafting, gilling should be used. In general, however, worsted spinning system is considered as of higher cost and lower in productivity, which results in much higher spinning costs in worsted system than in cotton system. Likewise, the creation of a yarn based on buffalo has always required that, at a minimum, a significant amount of wool be interspersed with the buffalo hair and/or fibers. At least one problem with the buffalo-wool blend is that it is more characteristic in feel, comfort and durability to wool than to buffalo.
To date, no one has been able to produce a yarn based solely on buffalo or bison hair (termed collectively herein xe2x80x9cbuffaloxe2x80x9d) at a lower cost, as well as higher productivity and good quality. Whole buffalo hair and buffalo down blended with a minimum of 40% wool fibers have long been used for providing durable, warm and comfortable protection in cold and warm weathers. A yarn based solely on buffalo hair and fibers would be expected to have similar or improved characteristics, however, the inability to produce such yarn in an efficient, cost-effective manner has not been achieved.
It has been found, however, that the present invention may be used to produce yarn from buffalo hair and fibers in an efficient and cost-effective manner. In the industry it has long been felt that buffalo hair could not be formed into yarn due to characteristics of the fibers that were incompatible with the yarn manufacturing systems, viz., the woolen, worsted and cotton systems.
A significant problem of the woolen, worsted and cotton systems is that they were not designed for the formation of yarn from complex fleece, such as buffalo fleece. One problem with buffalo fleece is that it may contain up to 5 different types of hair fibers, that is, it is a multi-layered fleece.
What is needed is a method of preparing buffalo hair and fibers for the creation of buffalo based yarn, and in particular, yarn that is made solely with buffalo hair. In the present invention, a pure buffalo yarn is produced that does not include wool or other fiber fillers.
More particularly, the present invention is a method of producing yarn solely from buffalo hair including the steps of, scouring a buffalo fleece with detergent and water at a temperature of at least 80 degrees centigrade to clean the fleece and separating the coarse from the down hair of the buffalo fleece. Next, the buffalo fleece is dehaired to remove unwanted course hair from the fleece to produce dehaired fleece, followed by blending the dehaired fleece with an oil and water emulsion in a mixing picker to produce a mixed fiber.
A modified carding step follows the blending step in which the mixed fibers produce a roving of straight and parallel fibers. In the modified carding step it has been found that passing the blended hair at between about 30 to 70 percent of the normal weight before the second carding step enhances the yarn. Carding at 40 to 60 percent or even at 50 percent weight percent has been found to be particularly useful to improve the smoothness and wear-ability of the yarn in garments.
Following the modified carding step, it has been further found that spinning both roving ends together also improves the features of the yarn. Finally, less twist and lower draft are applied to the double roving to create a softer and stronger yarn. The method of the present invention may also include the collection of the fleece from a buffalo hide using sheep shears prior to the step of scouring the fleece.